Memoirs

“ "A man who leaves memoirs, whether well or badly written, provided they be sincere, renders a service to future psychologists and writers, giving them not only a faithful picture, but likewise human documents that may be relied upon." ”

“ People generally think those memoirs only worthy to be read or remembered which abound in great or striking events; those, in short, which in a high degree excite either admiration or pity: all others they consign to contempt and oblivion. ”

“ How far these Memoirs are genuine in the sense which makes them so attractive—that is to say, as literally authentic pictures of a great man's interior life, of his actual words and behaviour as witnessed by his intimates—must always remain doubtful to the sceptical mind. True reminiscences are naturally somewhat cloudy in outline, hanging loose together with gaps and interruptions; whereas these are all coherent, clear-cut, and written in a style that gives superior polish and setting to every scene and anecdote. That they are compiled upon a solid substratum of truth need not be questioned ”

“ If I have any readers, I ask their pardon for these digressions. They must remember that these Memoirs were written in my old age, and the old are always garrulous. The time will come to them also, and then they will understand that if the aged repeat themselves, it is because they live in a world of memories, without a present and without a future. ”

“ I show you the wrong side of events which history does not display: history exhibits only the right side. Memoirs have the advantage of presenting both surfaces of the texture: in this respect they depict the whole complexion of humanity better, by exposing, as in the tragedies of Shakespeare, low and exalted scenes. ”

“ Going to the book-cases, she sought for one accurately,—why she should seek, as though she had come in with the intention of finding it, a volume of frothy eighteenth-century memoirs she could not have told,—pulled it out, and, smiling again upon them with unconstrained lightness, she left them. ”

“ Worthy or not, my life is my subject, and my subject is my life. I have lived without dreaming that I should ever take a fancy to write the history of my life, and, for that very reason, my Memoirs may claim from the reader an interest and a sympathy which they would not have obtained, had I always entertained the design to write them in my old age, and, still more, to publish them. ”

“ For beyond writing materials and a tireless forearm there are in the manufacture of memoirs only two essentials: one must live during an interesting period of the world’s history and one must from time to time meet, or at the very least see, a variety of well-known persons. ”

“ To help us to get a fairer estimate, her own "Memoirs," written by herself, and now first given to readers in an English dress, should surely serve. Avowedly compiled in a vague, desultory way, with no particular regard to chronological sequence, these random recollections should interest us, in the first place, as a piece of unconscious self-portraiture. ”

“ The [575] diction of memoirs is somewhat determined by circumstances and subject; but if you write an autobiography, you should see to it that your words and constructions are unmistakably simple. Be as modest as is consistent with your great deeds, and as cheerful as the fates will allow. If you make yourself out a good fellow, do so by the general impression of your narrative, not by assertion. ”

“ The reader, after a perusal of the succeeding narratives, will not hesitate, I hope, to corroborate my assertion that each of these eight memoirs contains many incidents of general interest and that all of these neglected persons lived lives which are worthy of description in detail. ”

“ The writer of these remarkable memoirs, whose anonymity will not veil his identity from his friends, is a man well known, not only in England, but also abroad, and the pages are full of the writer’s charm, and gaiety of spirit, and “courage of a day that knows not death.” ”

“ Memoirs, recollections, anecdotes of the Bar or of the Academy are much more interesting, and may be valuable as throwing sidelights on history, but still only amuse and help to kill the time of which we forget the value. ”

“ In a more original vein, though also principally Scottish, are those papers which may be described as memoirs and character-sketches in a more express sense than the three or four already referred to as combining memoir with criticism. By far the most important of these is his Memoir of his own Father, in supplement to the Life of his Father by the Rev. Dr. ”

“ It is now many years since I began these memoirs. I wrote fully a third of them, and then put them aside, having found increasing difficulties as I went on with my task. These arose out of the constant need to use the first person in a narrative of adventure and incidents which chiefly concern the writer, even though it involve also the fortunes of many in all ranks of life. ”

“ From the very start that assembly of poets trembled with excitement; they felt they had a poet before them, and the volume opened with these lines, which I may be permitted to quote, although they are known by all the world. We have said, and we cannot repeat it too often, that these memoirs are not only Memoirs but recollections of the art, poetry, literature and politics of the first fifty years of the century. When we have attacked, severely, perhaps, but honestly and loyally, things that were base and low and shameful ”

“ Everybody, of every degree of rank or talent, who has read the Memoirs, speaks of them in the most gratifying and delightful manner. Those who have fixed on individual circumstances have always fixed on those which we should have considered as most curious. ”

“ Make the supposition that any given number of persons,—a hundred, for instance,—taken promiscuously, should be able to write memoirs of themselves so clear and perfect as to explain, to your discernment at least, the entire process by which their minds have attained their present state, recounting all the most impressive circumstances. ”

“ In order that the accuracy, or at least the sincerity of memoirs may not be disputed, each family should be in a position to substantiate them by its own recollections; and it is well that the generation which reads them should follow that which they depict. The records they contain are all the more useful because the times which they chronicle have not yet become altogether historic. ”

“ Those who write memoirs of remarkable men from personal knowledge, should remember that details of their habits and conversation will be much more valuable to posterity, than disquisitions upon their scientific labours and discussions, which, coming from the pens of friends or relations, will always be looked upon as ex parte statements. ”

“ Memoirs generally record the lives of individuals or facts pertaining to individual lives. A biography is distinctively a written account of one person's life and actions; an autobiography is a biography written by the person whose life it records. ”

“ While a proper and very natural sentiment demands that the memoirs of the beloved ones should not appear until some time has passed away, it is also proper that their publication should not be put off till all trace of the facts recorded and the impressions there from made have been forgotten. ”

“ I read in your journal of the 25th instant, an article which announces an edition of my Memoirs, published in Germany, and in the German language. I did entrust the manuscript of my Reflections upon the Dramatic Art, and my own Memoirs, to a foreigner, and a man of letters, whom I greatly love and esteem. ”

“ If a book of art is one that asks for and receives a literary response, Memoirs is no work of art. The sole response evoked by the book is sensual. Nor does the orderly presentation of Memoirs make a difference; it presents nothing but lascivious scenes organized solely to arouse prurient interest and produce sustained erotic tension. [3] Certainly the book's baroque style cannot vitiate the determination of obscenity. ”

“ That the characters lightly sketched in these Memoirs have been taken from life—i.e., that the ideas of them have been furnished by real personages—I in some measure candidly allow, though I have avoided making the portraits invidiously exact; as in a dream, busy fancy weaves a tissue of events out of the stored impressions of the brain, so, of course, the writer of a story must in like manner, though with more congruity, arrange and embody his scattered recollections, though not necessarily in the exact shape and order in which the objects, &c., originally presented themselves. ”

“ But this essay stands alone, at all events in English, as an attempt to take Casanova seriously, to show him in his relation to his time, and in his relation to human problems. And yet these Memoirs are perhaps the most valuable document which we possess on the society of the eighteenth century; they are the history of a unique life, a unique personality, one of the greatest of autobiographies; as a record of adventures, they are more entertaining than Gil Blas, or Monte Cristo, or any of the imaginary travels, and escapes, and masquerades in life, which have been written in imitation of them. ”

“ In writing the life of our philosopher, the plan of a dry recital of only such circumstances and occurrences as have an immediate relation to the individual, has not been pursued. Biographical Memoirs, it is conceived, do not confine a writer to limits so narrow, but permit him to take a much greater latitude. ”

“ Who is there interested in men and letters, and in the life of the past, who would not cry, “Where can such a book as this be found?”
Yet the above catalogue is but a brief outline, a bare and meagre summary, of the book known as “THE MEMOIRS OF CASANOVA”; a work absolutely unique in literature. He who opens these wonderful pages is as one who sits in a theatre and looks across the gloom, not on a stage-play, but on another and a vanished world. The curtain draws up, and suddenly a hundred and fifty years are rolled away, and in bright light stands out before us the whole life of the past ”

“ The best French memoirs are writ by such persons as were the principal actors in those transactions they pretend to relate, whether of wars or negotiations. Those of sir William Temple are of the same nature; and therefore, in my judgment, the publisher [2] (who sent them into the world without the author's privity) gave them a wrong title, when he called them "Memoirs of what passed in Christendom, &c." ”

“ To the light reader, who but skims over the surface of a book, and enjoys the tale merely as one of passing amusement, forgotten soon as read, these Memoirs offer all that the most fastidious can desire of the piquant and attractive: to the reflective reader, who, not content with the mere detail of events, inquires into causes, searches out motives, and philosophizes, en passant, on the wit or weakness, power or puerility, of the human mind, herein will be found ample scope and verge enough for his most meditative musings. ”

“ There are, however, some memoirs that are trustworthy and dull, and others, again, that are conspicuously trustworthy, and yet are as entertaining as a novel, and to this latter category belong the memoirs of Hans von Schweinichen, the Silesian Knight, Marshal and Chamberlain to the Dukes of Liegnitz and Brieg at the close of the 16th century. ”

“ Those memoirs, therefore, are properly a relation of a general treaty of peace, wherein the author had the principal as well as the most honourable part in quality of mediator; so that the frequent mention of himself seems not only excusable but necessary. ”

“ Augustine's Confessions to the gossip of Lady Dorothy Nevill. Such books, however, have all one family likeness. They all of them represent life as seen by the writers from a personal point of view; and in this sense it is to the family of Memoirs that the present book belongs.
But the incidents or aspects of life which a book of memoirs describes represent something more than themselves. Whether the writer is conscious of the fact or no, they represent a circle of circumstances, general as well as private, to which his individual character reacts ”

“ The kind that mostly issues in biography is the practical temperament. Poets have the shortest memoirs, and the most uninteresting. The politician, the philanthropist, the general, make the best, the most graphic Lives. ”

“ Dear reader, examine the spirit of this preface, and you will at once guess at my purpose. I have written a preface because I wish you to know me thoroughly before you begin the reading of my Memoirs. It is only in a coffee-room or at a table d’hote that we like to converse with strangers. ”

“ His notes are classics in their kind, and have set the example of a new sort of military memoirs, that of the simple and obscure, who come from the people and represent them in the ordinary man. An accurate rendering of their impressions is likely to be valuable and interesting. ”

“ Thus if any writer attempts to do what I have done myself—namely, to examine or depict in books of widely different kinds such aspects and problems of life—social, philosophical, religious, and economic—as have in turn engrossed his special attention, he may venture to hope that a memoir of his own activities will be taken as representing an age, rather than a personal story, his personal story being little more than a variant of one which many readers will recognize as common to themselves and him. ”

“ Therefore, dear reader, I trust that, far from attaching to my history the character of impudent boasting, you will find in my Memoirs only the characteristic proper to a general confession, and that my narratory style will be the manner neither of a repenting sinner, nor of a man ashamed to acknowledge his frolics. They are the follies inherent to youth; I make sport of them, and, if you are kind, you will not yourself refuse them a good-natured smile. You will be amused when you see that I have more than once deceived without the slightest qualm of conscience, both knaves and fools. ”